Happy New Year 2018! (And Mathematical Facts About 2018)

This numerical coincidence that I found is quite poetic. The way I see it, 20170 signifies the end of 2017. This is followed by a countdown which concludes with an exclamation welcoming 2018.

Is this a sign of a good year ahead? Who knows. It’s difficult to rely on numbers to answer this kind of question. After all, there’s also this:

2018 = 666 + 666 + 666 + 6 + 6 + 6 + .666… + .666… + .666…

I’ll just hope for the best and plan for the worst, as the adage goes. Either way, I wish you all a very Happy New Year. Wishing you good health and happiness. Have a great year ahead.

Notes

20170 is equal to 1.

“!” is referred to as a factorial sign and 0! is equal to 1.

0.666… is a repeating decimal which is equivalent to . Thus, .

More Mathematical Facts About 2018

The following are more facts that I discovered about the number 2018. Some of these facts were gleaned from The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS). They are marked with (A######). It’s difficult to research about numbers there. I’m not sure if I’d do it again.

Summation New Year

Image: Shutterstock

The ∑ symbol is called summation and the equation above can be simply written as:

Symmetrical New Year

Image: Flickr

Another Countdown Pattern

A few days ago, I found another 2018 countdown pattern and I included it in a comment to Iva Sallay’s post on Find the Factors. She made a GIF of the countdown and she gave me permission to post it here. So, here it is:

Yet Another Countdown Pattern

I don’t know what to think on this one. On one hand, it looks cool. On the other hand, the symmetry is rather off:

Semiprimes

The year 2017 is a prime year since 2017 is prime, and the next prime year will be in 2027 which is still several years away. But don’t worry. While 2018 is not a prime year, it’s still an interesting year nonetheless as it’s a semiprime in several ways.

2018 is the 36th semiprime of the form p + 1, where p is a prime number (since 2017 is prime):

2018 = 2017 + 1

There are 672 semiprimes of this form below 100000. The next number with this property is 2138 (A077068).

In addition, 2018 is the 32nd semiprime of the form p2 + q2,where p and q are two distinct primes.

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My name Edmark M. Law. I work as a freelance writer, mainly writing about science and mathematics. I am an ardent hobbyist. I like to read, solve puzzles, play chess, make origami and play basketball. In addition, I dabble in magic, particularly card magic and other sleight-of-hand type magic. I live in Hong Kong.
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What a great blog! I teach 6th Grade at a Waldorf School in Oregon and I’d love to follow your writing! I was born in 1970, the Year of the Dog and am SO happy that it’s the Year of the Dog in 2018! I also love even numbered years and so am happy for that reason too.
I have painted a picture to celebrate the Year of the Dog 2018.

Playing with numbers is a wonderful pastime and we humans are always seeking significance in everything around us. I suppose that is why mathematics is the skeleton on which the flesh of science is constructed. Among the cosmologists today we have those who believe the universe is mathematical just as Pythagoras did all those centuries ago.
The great danger of predictability is it can lead us into a sort of astrological outlook and the next step is not to walk under ladders.

Terrific, thanks. And you made this dullard look up the meaning of semi-prime number: a number that is formed by multiplying two prime numbers together. The nice takeaway from what I read was that because of the unique factorization of semi-primes, there is only one rectangle to be made from 2018 objects: in this case, a 2 x 1009 rectangle.

And, if you take 2018 and reverse it, you get 8102. If you reverse THAT, you get 2018 again. Imagine what a waste of time it was reversing it in the first place.
If you put ‘8102’ on a calculator, it spells “BIOS”. If you reverse the vowels and make each consonant into two consonants that either add up to the original consonant or at least part their hair on the same side, you get the word “MELVIN” which is an anagram of “Vilemn” the Egyptian goddess of numbers and leaky rafts. If you do the same thing to the word “EGYPTIAN” you get pretty tiresome after a while.
Spooky… isn’t it?

EGYPTIAN can be anagrammed to EIAYGTPN, the Egyptian God of Anagrams, Obscenity, Debauchery, Rock Music, and Darkness. Now, I tried to Combine Egyptian and Darkness to see what happens. It turned out that EGYPTIAN DARKNESS can be anagrammed to GETS AN INKY SPREAD, which could make sense I suppose.

As we are now talking about Egyptians, why not talk about pyramids as well! THE EGYPTIAN PYRAMIDS can be anagrammed to A HEAD-TIPPING MYSTERY! (Hah, didn’t expect that).

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Learn Fun Facts is an archive of curious facts for the curious. I write on a variety of subjects, including mathematics, science, technology, language, history, literature, art and anything in between.